Albert Pike found Freemasonry in a log cabin and left it
in a Temple. He was the master genius of Masonry in America, both as
scholar and artist. No other mind of equal power ever toiled so long
in the service of the Craft in the New World. No other has left a
nobler fame in our annals.

A great American and a great Mason, the life of Pike is
a part of the romance of his country. Outside the Craft he was known
as a poet, journalist, soldier, jurist, orator, and his ability in so many
fields fills one with amazement. Apart from the chief work of his life
in Masonry, he merits honor as a philosopher and a scholar. Indeed, he
was one of the richest minds of his age, resembling the sages of the ancient
world in his appearance and in the quality of his mind. Those who do
not know Masonry often think of him as a man whom history passed by and
forgot.

Pike was born in Boston, Massachusetts, December 29,
1809, of a family in which are several famous names, such as Nicholas Pike,
author of the first arithmetic in America, and the friend of Washington; and
Zebulon Pike, the explorer, who gave his name to Pike's Peak. His
father, he tells us, was a shoemaker who worked hard to give his children
the benefit of an education; his Mother a woman of great beauty, but
somewhat stern in her ideas of rearing a boy. As a child he saw the
festivities at the close of the War with Great Britain, in 1815. When
Albert Pike was four his father moved to Newburyport, and there the boy grew
up, attending the schools of the town, and also the academy at Framingham.
At fourteen he was ready for the freshman class at Harvard, but was unable
to pay the tuition fees for two years in advance, as was required at that
time, and proceeded to educate himself. Had he been admitted to
Harvard he would have been in the class of Oliver Wendell Holmes.

As a lad, Albert Pike was sensitive, high-strung,
conscious of power, very shy and easily depressed; but, ambitious and
determined to make his place in the world. Always a poet, while
teaching school at Fairhaven he wrote a series of poems called "Hymns to the
Gods," which he afterward revised and sent to Christofer North, editor of
"Blackwood's Magazine," at Edinburg, receiving in reply a letter hailing him
as a truly great poet. Had Pike given himself altogether to poetry he
would have been one of the greatest of American Poets; but, he seemed not to
care for such fame but only for the joy, and sometimes the pain, of writing.
Indeed, the real story of his inner life may be traced in his poems, a
volume of which was published as early as 1813, in honor of which event his
friends gave him a reception.

In a poem called "Fatasma" he pictures himself at that
time as a pale-faced boy, wasted by much study, reciting his poems to a
crowded room. As his lips move his eyes are fastened on the lovely
face and starry eyes of a girl to whom he dared not tell his love, because
she was rich and he was poor. No doubt this hopeless love had much to
do with his leaving New England to seek his fortune in the West.
Anyway, it made him so sore of heart that the word God does not appear in
his poetry for several years. Another reason for going away was the
rather stern environment of New England, in which he felt that he could
never do and be his best. So, he sings:

Weary of fruitless toil he leaves his home, To seek in
other climes a fairer fate.

Pike left New England in March, 1831, going first to
Niagara, and thence, walking nearly all the way, to St. Louis.
In August he joined a party of forty traders with ten covered wagons
following the old Santa Fe Trail. He was a powerful man, six feet and
two inches tall, finely formed, with dark eyes and fair skin, fleet of foot
and sure of shot, able to endure hardship, and greatly admired by the
Indians. He spent a year at Santa Fe, the unhappiest months of his
life. Friendless, homesick, haunted by many memories, he poured out
his soul in sad-hearted poems in which we see not only the desperate
melancholy of the man but the vivid colors of the scenery and life round
about him. Shelly was his ideal, Coleridge his inspiration but his own
genius was more akin to Bryant than any other of our singers. What
made him most forlorn is told in such lines as these:

Friends washed off by life's ebbing tide, Like sands
upon the shifting coasts, The soul's first love another's bride; And
other melancholy though.

Happily, new scenes, new friends, and new adventures
healed his heart, and a new note of joy is added to his rare power of
describing the picturesque country in which he was a pilgrim. In 1832,
with a trapping party, he went down the Pecos river into the Staked Plains,
and then to the headwaters of the Brazos and Red Rivers. It was a
perilous journey and he almost died of hunger and thirst, as he has told us
in his poem, "Death in the Desert." After walking five hundred miles
he arrived at Fort Smith, Arkansas, friendless, without a dollar, and
well-nigh naked. He was soon teaching school in a tiny log cabin near
Van Buren, and, tired of wandering, his life began to take root and grow.

Again his pen was busy, writing verses for the "Little
Rock Advocate," as well as political articles under the pen name "Casca,"
which attracted so much notice that Horace Greely reprinted them in the New
York Tribune. Soon the whole state was eager to know the genius who
signed himself "Casca." Robert Crittenden and Judge Turner rode
through the wilderness and found the tall, handsome young man teaching in a
log schoolhouse on Little Piney River. Charmed with his modesty and
power, they invited him to go to Little Rock as assistant editor of the
Advocate. Here ended the winter of his wanderings, and his brilliant
summer began among friends who love him and inspired him to do his best.

Pike made an able editor, studying law at night, never
sleeping more than five hours a day - which enabled him to do as much work
as two men usually do. By 1835 he owned the Advocate, which contained
some of his best writing. He delved deep into law, mastering its
history, its philosophy; and, once admitted to the bar, his path to success
was an open road. About this time we read a tender poem, "To
Mary," showing that other thoughts were busy in his mind. That same
year he married Miss Mary Hamilton, a beautiful girl whom he met on a June
day at the home of a friend. A few months later appeared this "Prose
Sketches and Poems," followed by a longer poem; bold, spirited, and
scholarly entitled "Ariel." His poems were printed, for the most part,
by his friends as he seemed deaf to the whispers of literary ambition.

In the War with Mexico Pike won fame for his valor in
the field of Buena Vista, and he has enshrined that scene in a thrilling
poem. After the war he took up the cause of the Indians, whose life
and languages fascinated him and who, he felt, were being robbed of their
rights. He carried their case to the Supreme Court. to whose Bar he
was admitted in 1849, along with Abraham Lincoln and Hannibal Hamlin.
His speech in the case of the Senate Award to the Choctaws
is famous, Webster passing high eulogy upon it. Judged by any test, Pike
was a great orator, uniting learning with practical acumen, grace with
power, and the imperious magnetism which only genius can command.

Pike was made a Master Mason in Western Star Lodge No.
1, Little Rock, Arkansas, July, 1850; and the symbolism of the Craft
fascinated him from the first, both as a poet and scholar. Everywhere
he saw suggestions, dim intimations, half-revealed and half-concealed ideas
which could not have had their origin among the common craft Masons of old.
He set himself to study the Order, his enthusiasm keeping pace with his
curiosity, in search of the real origin and meaning of its symbols. At
last he found that Freemasonry is the Ancient Great Mysteries in disguise,
it's simple emblems the repository of the highest wisdom of the Ancient
World, to rescue and expound which became more and more his desire and
passion. Here his words:

"It began to shape itself to my intellectual vision into
something imposing and majestic, solemnly mysterious and grand. It
seemed to me like the Pyramids in the grandeur and loneliness, in whose yet
undiscovered chambers may be hidden, for the en-lightenment of the coming
generations, the sacred books of the Egyptians, so long lost to the World;
like the Sphinx, half-buried in the sands. In essence, Freemasonry is
more ancient than any of the world's living religions. So I came at
last to see that its symbolism is its soul."

Thus a great poet saw Freemasonry and sought to renew
the luster of its symbols of high and gentle wisdom, making it a great
humanizing, educational and spiritual force among men. He saw in it a
faith deeper than all creeds, larger than all sects, which, if rediscovered,
he believed, would enlighten the world. It was a worthy ambition for
any man, and one which Pike, by the very quality of his genius, as well as
his tastes, temper and habits of mind, seemed born to fulfill. All
this beauty, be it noted, Pike found in the old Blue Lodge - he had not yet
advanced to the higher degrees - and to the end of his life the Blue Lodge
remained to him a wonder and a joy. There he found universal Masonry,
all the higher grades being so many variations on its theme. He did
not want Masonry to be a mere social club, but a power for the shaping of
character and society.

So far Pike had not even heard of the Scottish Rite, to
which he was to give so many years of service. He seems not to have
heard of it until 1852, and then, as he tells us, with much the same feeling
with which a Puritan might hear of a Buddhist ceremony performed in a
Calvinistic church. He imagined that it was not Masonry at all, or
else a kind of Masonic atheism. His misunderstanding was due, perhaps,
to the bitter rivalry of rites which then prevailed, and which he did so
much to heal. At length he saw that Masonry was one, though its rites
are many, and he studied the Scottish Rite, its origin, history, and such
ritual as it had at the time, which was rather crude and chaotic, but
sufficient to reveal its worth and promise.

The Scottish appeared in America in 1801, at Charleston,
South Carolina, derived from a Supreme Council constituted in Berlin in
1786. For its authority it had, in manuscript, a Grand Constitution,
framed by the Prussian body - a document which Pike afterwards defended so
ably, though toward the end of his life he was led by facts brought out by
Gould and others, to modify his earlier position. The Council so
established had no subordinate bodies at first, and never very many, in
fact, until 1855, a very natural result in a country which, besides having
Masonry of its own, regarded the Rite as heresy. None the less Pike
entered the Scottish Rite, at Charleston, March 20, 1853, receiving its
degrees from the fourth to the thirty-second, and the thirty-third degree in
New Orleans, in 1857.

The following year he delivered a lecture in New
Orleans, by special request, before the Grand Lodge of Louisiana; his theme
being "The Evil Consequences od Schisms and Disputes for Power in Masonry,
and of Jealousy and Dissensions Between Masonic Rites" - one of the greatest
single Masonic lectures ever delivered, in which may be found the basis of
all his Masonic thought and teaching. Masonry, as Pike saw it, is
morality founded in faith and taught by symbols. It is not a religion,
but a worship in which all good men can unite, its purpose being to benefit
mankind physically, socially, and spiritually; by helping men to cultivate
freedom, friendship and character. To that end, beyond the facts of
faith - the reality of God, the moral law, and the hope of immortality - it
does not go.

One is not surprised to learn that Pike was made
Sovereign Grand Commander of the Scottish Rite, Southern Jurisdiction, in
1859. He at once began to recast the Rite, rewriting its rituals,
reshaping its degrees, some of which existed only in skeleton, and clothing
them in robes of beauty. To this task he brought all his learning as a
scholar, his insight as a poet, and his enthusiasm as a Mason. He
lived in Little Rock, in a stately home overlooking the city, where he kept
his vast library and did his work. In the same year, 1859, he was
reported dead by mistake, and had the opportunity of reading many eulogies
written in his memory. When the mistake was known, his friends
celebrated his "return from Hades," as it was called, by a festival.

Alas, then came the measureless woe of Civil War, and
Pike cast his lot with the South, and was placed in command of the Indian
Territory. Against his protest the Indian regiments were ordered from
the Territory and took part in the Battle of Elkhorn. The battle was a
disaster, and some atrocities by Indian Troops, whom he was unable to
restrain, cause criticism. Later, when the Union Army attacked Little
Rock the Commanding General, Thomas H. Benton, Grand Master of Masons in
Iowa, posted a guard to protect the home of Pike and his Masonic Library.
After the War Pike practiced Law for a time in Memphis. In 1868 he
moved to Alexandria, Virginia, and in 1870 to Washington.

Again he took up his labors in behalf of Masonry,
revising its rituals, and writing those nobel lectures into which he
gathered the wisdom of the ages - as though his mind were a great dome which
caught the echoes of a thousand thinkers. By 1871 the Scottish Rite
was influential and widely diffused, due, in part, to the energy and genius
of its Commander. In the same year he published "Morals and Dogma," a
huge manual for the instruction of the Rite, as much a compilation as a
composition, able but ill-arranged, which remains to this day a monument of
learning. It ought to be revised, rearranged, and reedited, since it
is too valuable to be left in so cumbersome a form, containing as it does
much of the best Masonic thinking and writing in our literature. It is
studded with flashing insights and memorable sayings, as for example:

Man is accountable for the uprightness of his doctrine,
But not for the rightness of it.

The free country where intellect and genius rule, will
endure.

Where they serve, and other influences govern, its life
is short. When the state begins to feed part of the people, it prepares all
to be slaves.

Deeds are greater than words.

They have a life, mute but undeniable, and they grow.

They people the emptiness of Time.

Nothing is really small.

Every bird that flies carries a thread of the infinite in
its claws.

Sorrow is the dog of that unknown Shephard who guides the
flock of men.

Life has its ills, but it is not all evil.

If life is worthless, so is immortality.

Our business is not to be better than others, but to be
better than ourselves.

For all his strength and learning, Pike was ever a
sensitive, beauty-loving soul, touched by the brevity and sadness of life,
which breathe in his poems. His best known poem, but by no means his
greatest, was written in 1872 entitled, "Every Year," in which this note of
melancholy is heard:

Life is a count of losses,

Every year;

For the weak are heavier crosses,

Every year;

Lost springs with sobs replying,

Unto weary Autumn's sighing,

While those we love are dying,

Every year.

To the past go more dead faces,

Every year;

As the loved leave vacant places,

Every year;

Everywhere the sad eyes meet us,

In the evening's dusk they greet us,

And to come to them entreat us,

Every year.

But the truer life draws
nigher,

Every year;

And the morning star climbs higher,

Every year;

Earth's hold on us grows
slighter,

And the heavy burden lighter,

And the Dawn Immortal brighter,

Every year.

Death often pressed the cup of sorrow to his lips.

Three of his children died in infancy. His first
son was drowned; his second, an officer, was killed in battle. His
eldest daughter died in 1869, and the death of his wife was the theme of a
melting poem, "The Widowed Heart." His tributes to his friends in the
Fraternity, as one by one they passed away, were memorable for their
tenderness and simple faith. Nothing could shake his childlike trust
in the veiled kindness of the Father of Men; and despite many clouds, "Hope
still with purple flushed his sky."

In his lonely later years, Pike betook himself more and
more to his studies, building a city of the mind for inward consolation and
shelter. He mastered many languages - Sanskrit, Hebrew, old Samarian,
Persian - seeking what each had to tell of beauty and of truth. He
left in the library of the House of the Temple fifteen large manuscript
volumes, translations of the sacred books of the East, all written with an
old-fashioned quill, in a tiny flowing hand, without blot or erasure.
There he held court and received his friends amid the birds and flowers he
loved so well. He was companionable, abounding in friendship,
brilliant in conversation, his long white hair lending him an air of
majesty, his face blushing like a child's at merited praise, simple. kindly,
lovable. So death found him in April, 1891, fulfilling his own lines
written as a boy:

So I, who sing, shall die,

Worn thin and pale, by care and sorrow;

And, fainting. with a soft unconscious sigh,

Bid unto this poor body that I borrow,

A long good-by - tomorrow

To enjoy, I hope, eternal spring in high

Beyond the sky.

So passed Pike. No purer, nobler man has stood at
the Altar of Freemasonry or left his story in our traditions. He was
the most eminent Mason in the world, alike for his high rank, his rich
culture, and his enduring service. Nor will our craft ever permit to
grow dim the memory of that stately, wise, and gracious teacher - a Mason to
whom the world was a Temple, a poet to whom the world was a song.